Hillary Clinton Bets Big on President Obama

If there had been any doubt about how Hillary Clinton would react to her heavy loss in Tuesday’s New Hampshire primary, she telegraphed the answer at last night’s PBS-hosted debate, in Milwaukee. The former Secretary of State is seeking to associate herself with the most popular Democrat in the country, President Barack Obama, and trying to disassociate her opponent, Bernie Sanders, from him.

Time and again across a long, and occasionally tetchy, evening, Clinton sought to use the President as a shield to guard against Sanders’s blows, and as a sword with which to try and wound her opponent. At one point, she even accused Sanders of echoing Republican attacks on Obama—a claim that prompted Sanders to reply, “Madame Secretary, that is a low blow.” Indeed it was. But these are low days for the Clinton campaign—and the race is now headed to Nevada and South Carolina, two states with a lot of minority voters, a group that thinks very highly of Obama.

There wasn’t anything new, per se, about Clinton seeking to link herself with the President. From the beginning of her campaign, she has sought to portray herself as his heir, and with ample cause. She inherited much of her domestic-policy platform and campaign staff from the President, whom she served for four years—a fact she seldom misses an opportunity to point out. But faced with a much stronger challenge from Sanders than her campaign expected, Clinton appears to have elevated Obama from the role of esteemed former and implicit endorser to that of a central—perhaps the central—figure in her campaign.

Early in the debate, she reasserted her staunch support for the Affordable Care Act, using her now-familiar line: “Before it was called Obamacare, it was called Hillarycare.” (Actually, it was “Romneycare” first, but we’ll let that pass.) She also lauded the President’s efforts to improve race relations and tackle the immigration problem. But Clinton really signalled her intent to draw in Obama after Sanders mentioned the ten million dollars in donations from Wall Street that a Super PAC affiliated with her campaign has received.

First, she pointed out that the Super PAC in question, Priorities USA, was set up to support President Obama, which is true but irrelevant. Priorities USA is now run by Clinton loyalists, and, according to several reports, she has been courting donations to it. Like all campaign Super PACs that support individual candidates, it is essentially at one with her campaign.

Perhaps realizing that this wasn’t a winning line of argument, Clinton fell back on a case she made in the last debate: the mere fact that you receive campaign donations from a certain industry or interest group doesn’t mean that you are a shill for the donor. But rather than citing herself as an example, she used Obama, noting that, in 2008, he received more donations from Wall Street than any other Democrat ever had. “Now, when it mattered, he stood up and took on Wall Street,” Clinton said. “He pushed through, and he passed the Dodd–Frank regulation, the toughest regulations since the nineteen-thirties. So, let’s not in any way imply here that either President Obama or myself would in any way not take on any vested interest, whether it’s Wall Street, or drug companies, or insurance companies, or frankly, the gun lobby, to stand up to do what’s best for the American people.”

Many people believe that the Obama Administration went easy on Wall Street, of course. But rather than make this argument, which would have involved criticizing the President, Sanders fell back on an approach he has used before. “Let’s not insult the intelligence of the American people,” he said. “People aren’t dumb. Why in God’s name does Wall Street make huge campaign contributions? I guess just for the fun of it; they want to throw money around.”

The two most dramatic moments in the debates came near the end. The first one came when, after Clinton spoke about her role in advising President Obama to go ahead with the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, Sanders criticized her for seeking the foreign-policy advice of Henry Kissinger. “I am proud to say that Henry Kissinger is not my friend,” Sanders said. “I will not take advice from Henry Kissinger.” He reminded viewers of Kissinger’s role in the covert bombing of Cambodia, and said that it had created the conditions for the rise of Pol Pot, “who then butchered some three million innocent people, one of the worst genocides in the history of the world. So count me in as somebody who will not be listening to Henry Kissinger.”

Clinton didn’t have a convincing answer to that one, but she had a trump card of her own. Near the end of the debate, she brought up an interview that Sanders gave to MSNBC, on Wednesday, in which he said that Obama had failed to close the gap between Congress and the American people. “Senator Sanders said that President Obama failed the Presidential leadership test,’’ Clinton said. “And this is not the first time that he has criticized President Obama. In the past he has called him weak. He has called him a disappointment.”

“He wrote a foreword for a book that basically argued voters should have buyers’ remorse when it comes to President Obama’s leadership and legacy. And I just couldn’t disagree more with those kinds of comments,” she said. President Obama had inherited “not only the worst financial crisis but the antipathy of the Republicans in Congress,” Clinton added. “I don’t think he gets the credit he deserves for being a President who got us out of that, put us on firm ground, and has sent us into the future.”

It was clearly an attack that Clinton had prepared in advance. As she delivered it, her supporters in the room, of whom there were many, burst into loud cheers. But she wasn’t done yet. In fact, she was just setting up her punchline: “The kind of criticism that we’ve heard from Senator Sanders about our President I expect from Republicans. I do not expect from someone running for the Democratic nomination to succeed President Obama.”

In fact, the statements that Clinton was referring to sounded nothing like Republican attacks on the President. In his interview with MSNBC, Sanders didn’t say that Obama had failed any leadership test. Referring to the divide between Congress and the public, Sanders said that the President “has made the effort. But I think what we need, when I talk about a political revolution, is bringing millions and millions of people into the political process in a way that does not exist right now.”

The book Clinton was referring to is called “Buyers’ Remorse: How Obama Let Progressives Down,” which was written by Bill Press, a liberal talk-show host. After the debate finished, Press confirmed on CNN that Sanders did write a blurb for it (not, as Clinton had said, the foreword). But he said that the only criticism of Obama it contained was that, as President, he had failed to mobilize the supporters who voted him into office in 2008. This is basically the same thing that Sanders said to MSNBC, and it is something that he and many other progressives have been saying for years. To equate it with Republican attacks on the President is a travesty.

Clinton isn’t writing a history book, however. She is trying to win a difficult primary contest, and she desperately needs to defeat Sanders in Nevada and South Carolina. In the next couple of weeks, we will see if her new strategy works.